4
When I was a kid, my mom bought me the Encyclopedia Britannica. It weighed 130 pounds (according, ironically, to Wikipedia). I remember being amazed at how much information I suddenly had access to, thanks to the entries in those books. At night, we would have “question time,” when I would think of something I wanted to know more about and we’d try to find the answer in the pages of the encyclopedia. To me, this new access to information was empowering, but it also had limitations that as a kid, I didn’t fully understand. The answers on the pages were frozen in time the moment they were printed. And the topics were limited to things that an editorial board sitting in Chicago decided were important enough to include, without knowing anything about my personal interests or goals.
Growing up today is entirely different. Through the internet, our children literally have access to all the world’s information at their fingertips. There’s no filter of editorial boards or outdated print versions to update. Initiatives like Project Gutenberg and Google Books give us searchable access to almost all the books in the entire world without having to leave our house. While my Encyclopedia Britannica provided around a hundred thousand explanations, Wikipedia provides over 6 million articles in English alone. Even the most obscure concepts appear with citations and links to deeper learning. Don’t believe me? Go to Wikipedia and look up “spite house,” “infinite monkey theorem,” “towel day,” “vampire numbers,” or “The Great Molasses Flood.” And thanks to millions of online DIY videos, our children can get someone to coach them through learning just about anything, from acing algebra to dancing the dubstep to building a bike. According to the World Economic Forum, the information contained on the internet is somewhere around 44 zettabytes. My entire Encyclopedia Britannica would have been about 1 gigabyte of information. To try to put that in perspective, a single zettabyte is the same as a trillion copies of the Britannica. If you were able to read my entire encyclopedia in one second, it would take you 31,700 years to read a single zettabyte of data. Times that by forty-four, and you have, roughly, the amount of information stored on the internet today. The floodgates are truly open.
Learning to Love Learning
Einstein famously said, “Information is not knowledge.” Having access to all the information in the world doesn’t seem to guarantee that we will actually use it. In our information-rich world, it is critical that we help our kids learn to love learning. Learning is the gateway to new discoveries, understanding others, and having a meaning to life. But most of all, learning brings a powerful sense of accomplishment. As kids learn, they feel more able to contribute to the world in a meaningful way, which is closely tied to their self-esteem. Years of social science research has shown that all our attempts to tell kids how special they are isn’t nearly as effective at improving self-esteem as when they truly believe they have accomplished something noteworthy. Even an accomplishment as simple as correctly solving a math problem that was previously beyond their ability or learning to say a phrase in a new language can boost a child’s confidence more than another gold star. This effect is even more pronounced when the thing they accomplish is valued by their family or community. When a child learns to fix a friend’s broken bike, a team of kids win a debate competition, or a teenager helps a classmate translate something from English to Spanish, they feel a sense of purpose in what they’re accomplishing. These positive reinforcements are powerful motivators for continued learning. Being an effective learner is also the foundation for the next three attributes of digital citizenship (that we will discuss in the coming chapters).
Developing a love of learning starts as simply as encouraging curiosity. We humans are deeply curious by nature. We all have things we want to know more about, even if it’s something as trivial as what made that strange sound outside our window, or what Lady Gaga’s real name is (it’s Stefani Germanotta by the way). But the kind of curiosity we want to encourage is the proactive kind that chases after new information instead of waiting for something interesting to walk by. It’s the kind of curiosity that doesn’t come from external motivations (like grades, getting into college, bribes, or the threat of losing privileges). As powerful as those incentives may be at getting our kids to complete their assignments and make the honor roll, external motivations are much less effective at creating learners than a deep and genuine interest in the world. We all know from our own school experience that it is possible to optimize our efforts around getting an “A” without becoming the least bit interested in the topic. Curiosity, on the other hand, is the key to deeper learning. It leads to asking critical questions and engaging in complex reasoning. The good news is that, because humans are naturally curious, our job as parents isn’t so much to create a love of learning as it is to encourage the interest in learning that’s naturally there. Susan Engel, professor of psychology at Williams College and author of The Hungry Mind: The Origins of Curiosity in Childhood, offers several suggestions for encouraging curiosity in our children. Let me highlight two of them.
First, parents should show more interest in their kid’s exploration than in their mastery. Curiosity is about gaining knowledge, not already having it. The pursuit of knowledge is a long and messy process, and our children quickly pick up on how we feel about it. If we enjoy learning, they will likely see it as fun. If we get frustrated or impatient with the learning process, they will likely feel that way as well. Engel makes the point that if we want to raise curious children, we need to show excitement when our kids express interest in learning to play the guitar, not just when they can play their first song. We need to look for the value in a science experiment that didn’t go as planned, not just the one that won the science fair. Otherwise, children will devalue the process of learning, seeing it as nothing more than an annoying obstacle in the way of the end result.
The second suggestion from Engel is that parents need to create a family culture in which asking good questions is valued even more than having the right answers. In this kind of culture, family members are encouraged to wonder out loud. They often say things like, “I wonder why …” or “How might we …” They know that it’s normal not to know everything and aren’t bothered by not having all the answers. In this kind of home, parents also give their children the chance to work through tough questions on their own. It can take a lot of restraint not to give our kids the answer we know they’re looking for, especially when we’re busy, low on patience, or just tired. The more comfortable children are with their own limited understanding, the more comfortable they’ll feel asking questions when they’re in school, at work, and with friends, which, paradoxically, leads them to finding the answers faster than children who are obsessed with having the right answer. As a senior military officer once told me, “If you’re not afraid to be wrong, you’ll actually be right more often.”
Modeling the Digital World as a Learning Tool
Encouraging curiosity with our kids changes the value proposition for their access to the digital world. With just a bit of modeling, curious learners begin to recognize the digital world as access to a super-powerful learning library, not just an entertainment machine. Modeling digital learning can happen at almost any moment. When a child finds a bug in the house, just asking a question like, “What type of bug do you think this is?” or “How many different types of bugs do you think there are in the world?” can turn it into a digital learning moment. It gives you a chance to model using digital access to find an answer to a question you clearly don’t already know. By the way, I have actually done this and learned all kinds of fascinating things. For example, stink bugs are an invasive species in North America; they actually like the smell of their stink and communicate with each other using vibrations. Now, every time we come across a stink bug, that mundane experience has much more meaning.
Whenever the modeling can be tied to something that is relevant to a child’s life, the better it is. When my son asks if that light in the sky at night is a star or a plane, it’s the perfect opportunity to use an app like Sky Guide to help him find the answer. By pointing the phone at the sky, we might discover that the light is actually the planet Venus and that it is 162 million miles away. We might look up the circumference of the earth on Wikipedia (about 25,000 miles) and then calculate that 162 million miles is the same as going around the earth about 6,500 times. We could use the Wolfram Alpha app to get the speed of light (about 300,000 kilometers per second) and figure out it would take about 15 minutes for the light we’re seeing to have traveled from Venus before it reaches our eyes.
You may be reading this and thinking, “If I took the time to look up every question my kid has in a day, I’d never get anything done!” Just as we don’t need to offer new foods at every single meal in order to expand our children’s palate, modeling our access to the digital world for learning isn’t something you have to do every second of the day either. Even just an occasional modeling of answering questions using the digital tools is enough to help children see their technology devices as learning tools rather than only entertainment or communication tools. That’s the goal.
Becoming Information Curators
Viewing the virtual world as a learning tool is one of the most powerful and necessary foundations for informed digital citizens. Elliott Masie, a renowned learning leader and innovator who coined the term “e-learning,” says that in order to be successful in a zettabyte world, we must learn to become information curators. Curation is a term we usually associate with museums. Museum curation teams are responsible for collecting and storing artifacts and knowing how to pick the right artifacts from the collection to tell a story.
Several years ago, I had the opportunity to go into the basement of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Until then, I hadn’t realized how much of the museum’s collection was not on display. I was in a part of the paleobiology collection, which held a fraction of the nearly 150-million-piece total collection. The enormous room is filled with row after row of metal file cabinets, with aisles just wide enough to walk through. The drawers in the cabinets are shallower than traditional file cabinets, and each is filled with collections of bones from every imaginable animal. Hundreds of thousands of bones are neatly tagged and organized, some dating back millions of years.
Since there are costs to maintaining and preserving each item, the curators have the responsibility to select only pieces that have the most value to bring into the collection. Curators must also develop systems to store the artifacts in the collection. Not only does that mean making sure they are kept in a safe and dry space, but also that there is a system to tag and classify each item. After all, if you have 150 million artifacts but can’t find the one you’re looking for, the collection has very little value. The Smithsonian uses a process of tagging that assigns up to sixteen descriptions to each item, including the date added, type of animal, and the geolocation of the item in the museum’s archives. When curators pull artifacts out of the collection to put on display, they need to know what items complement each other and align with the goals of the exhibit. Their goal is to tell a story through the right placement of pieces from the collection.
Making the Selection
Informed digital citizens need to learn how to become curators of information in the same way that museum curators make decisions about their collections. The first step in information curation starts with learning how to identify useful information out of zettabytes of junk. This is not a trivial skill. There are complicated eighteen-step processes for teaching kids to be effective finders of information online, but that’s probably overkill. Here are three things we can do to model for our children to help them become effective digital curators:
1. Ask good questions. From a curation standpoint, a good question is one that most efficiently eliminates as much irrelevant information as possible and leads to the most-meaningful results. Most of the finding and selecting in the digital world starts with a search engine. When I was searching with my son to learn more about the brown marmorated stink bug, I explained that a good question might be “How many species of bugs are there in the world?” because if I searched for just “how many bugs,” Google might have thought I was talking about the total number of bugs in the world (which is also an interesting, but different, question). Take a moment to show your children the advanced search options on Google (just search for “google advanced search” if you haven’t been there before). You might show them how most search engines will search for an exact phrase when words are put in quotations. This is particularly helpful when searching for a name or title. It’s also important to reinforce that there is a wide variety of search tools. Take a minute to become familiar with a search engine other than Google, like DuckDuckGo, so they gain familiarity with multiple search tools. DuckDuckGo has the added benefit of not tracking or sharing your search history as other search engines do.
2. Choose the best source. After Google returns 72 million results in .44 seconds (jeez, do I have to wait all day?), we have the job choosing which results we will look at. For the stink bug example, I pointed out that there were answers from Quora, Smithsonian, and Wikipedia. We talked about which made the most sense for what we wanted to know. We could have talked about useful clues like whether the site has a .gov versus .com domain. However, the most important lesson for this step is modeling that the best information is not always the first result or even on the first page of results for any search. If the question relates to current events, sites like AllSides.com (which identifies bias in news reporting) might be particularly helpful for making the selection. If using a voice assistant for the search, pay attention to the source of the information provided and ask if it feels reliable.
3. Evaluate the usefulness. Once we select our digital information, we have to decide how much value it has for our purpose. This means evaluating the answer based on what we already know. We should get in the habit of asking, “Does that make sense given what else we’ve read?” Evaluating usefulness also means helping children become more comfortable with identifying the possible motives of the creator (is the goal to sell something, to persuade, to present research?). Digital media that are trying to sell something might be highly valuable if we’re looking to make a purchase, but less so if we’re looking for unbiased facts.
There are, of course, many other ways to find information beyond just doing a search. Signing up for daily news summaries or creating a custom Google Alert on a topic you care about will send you a message when new information is posted on the web. Subscribing to podcasts or video channels will do so as well. Elliott Masie points out that we should not forget about the power of using other people as part of our process for curating digital information. According to Masie, people who are really passionate about a topic tend to be great curators, because they’ll go deep into the topic and will sort and select information with discernment. We can tap into them by following their digital presence or, if we know them personally, asking for their recommendations on related topics. A critical competency for successful digital citizens is knowing how to use their hive mind—the ability to tap into human experts when they need answers, not just search engines. (See “Tagging and Storing Information” for ideas to help organize digital content.)
Tagging and Storing Information
Being able to find the right information at the right time is one of the most important competitive advantages in the digital world. In the early days of the internet, browser bookmarks were essentially the only way to tag and store digital content. Now there are a variety of strategies for tagging and storing digital media for future use. Here are some examples:
· Playlists. Tools like YouTube or Goodreads allow you to create collections of media by topic as well as subscribe to other people’s playlist collections.
· Albums. Similar to playlists, tools like Google Photos allow collections of photos and videos with artificial intelligence built in to help identify people, without having to tag them manually.
· Digital note-taking. Tools like Simplenote, Evernote, or a variety of other personal note-taking tools can be powerful ways to capture and search notes and information that you’ve collected.
· Tagged content. Most social media sites allow you to tag or label content for easy retrieval. Pocket is a web app that lets you tag content from anywhere in the digital world in a single location.
· Other people. This last one may seem strange, but we can use other humans in our network to help with the task of curating digital media. By connecting to other people on sites like LinkedIn, we can take advantage of their curation abilities around particular topics.
Watch Out for Alternative Facts
Evaluating the usefulness of the information we find in the digital world is one of the most complex of any of the digital citizenship skills we will discuss in this book. Informed digital citizens must learn that all information does not have the same value. This is tricky to teach because it’s a skill that adults aren’t very good at either. The most obvious offender here is blatantly false information—fake news, as it has become known. Misinformation campaigns have existed since the dawn of time. In 1755, it was reported that the Lisbon earthquake was divine retribution against sinners. In 1835, the New York Sun became profitable reporting that there was an alien civilization on the moon.1 But before mass adoption of digital tools, the spread and impact of misinformation was generally slow and limited. Now, in a world where the primary news source for two-thirds of Americans is Facebook, inaccurate information can be spread at an alarming rate.2 With the underlying business model of social media platforms being advertising, there isn’t really a business incentive to present information that is true, just information that will keep us scrolling and clicking. And this problem is not unique to Facebook. MIT researchers found that false information on Twitter is 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than the truth.3 This has led to an explosion of misinformation. On Election Day 2016, fake news actually outperformed real news in terms of number of views.4
We may be tempted to lower our filtering standards when friends and family share information with us, but we should be just as vigilant regardless of the source. A couple of years ago, in an attempt to reduce the spread of viral misinformation, Facebook experimented with changing its algorithms to make the news feed more focused on content from family and friends than on paid content. The hope was that this change would help stem the spread of fake news. The opposite happened. Prioritizing posts from family and friends actually increased the proliferation of misinformation, as people were less critical of inaccurate posts when shared by a family member. As a result, Facebook reverted to its original algorithm.5 As parents, we need to model and teach fact-checking even when the source of information is a close friend or relative.
Perhaps the most vivid illustration of how little foundation children have in recognizing misinformation in a digital space comes from a landmark study published by Donald Leu, a researcher at the University of Connecticut.6 Leu wanted to see how effective middle school children were at recognizing truth from fiction online. He created a simple but brilliant experiment. He worked with middle school teachers, who assigned students to research the most ridiculous thing he could possibly think of: an endangered Pacific Northwest tree octopus. There is, of course, no such thing as an endangered northwestern tree octopus, or any sort of cephalopod living in trees. Leu’s study was simple. Count the number of students who recognized that the assignment was a total hoax, based on their ability to tell truth from fiction online.
The students went to the internet, where they found a website dedicated to preserving the northwest tree octopus, which Leu’s team had created. The site was complete with descriptions of the habitat and feeding needs of the octopus and even a Photoshopped picture of an octopus climbing a snowy pine tree. What was the outcome? Only one student questioned the topic. All the rest finished the assignment, citing facts and details from the informative site they had found. These middle school students had been selected by their school as the top readers. How could they complete the assignment when everything they knew about pine forests and ocean life should have pointed to the absurdity? There was no other support for the idea on the internet than the one site manufactured by Leu’s team.
Leu’s study, while creative, had a relatively small sample size and only looked at students in the United States. Is it possible that a larger, more comprehensive study might show different results? Every three years, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development administers the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA. The study is conducted in seventy-nine countries and measures fifteen-year-olds’ ability to use their reading, mathematics, and science knowledge to meet real-life challenges. PISA is essentially the world’s education report card. Whenever you hear statements comparing one country’s education system to another—like “Finland has better schools than the United States” or “China is the best country in the world at teaching math”—the data for those statements comes from the PISA. For the first time, in 2018 PISA began measuring students’ ability to recognize truth from fiction. Students were given opportunities to demonstrate their ability to choose facts that supported a claim. For example, they might be asked to make a case about the health benefits of chocolate by selecting the most appropriate resources to validate their conclusion. Nine in ten students worldwide were unable to successfully complete tasks that required them to determine the validity of information sources.7
Beyond Fake News
Not all manipulative digital media are blatantly fabricated. Digital citizens need to develop a “Spidey sense” for recognizing information that is manipulative by being used out of context, even if not technically false. A Stanford University study of eight thousand middle school, high school, and college students indicated a consistent failure in their ability to distinguish news from advertising, identifying the source of a tweeted fact, or recognizing that a website was created purely for marketing purposes.8 It is particularly easy to get tripped up when looking at charts and graphs that have been manipulated to make a point. Data journalist Dan Kopf expressed frustration at how poorly we prepare young people to interpret visual representations of data. Kopf believes that there is a direct link between preserving our democracy and our children’s ability to read charts.9 “This isn’t a trivial matter,” says Kopf. “[A] lack of ability to interpret charts makes people more susceptible to being misled.” As parents, we should be on the lookout for misleading charts or graphs to use as a learning opportunity for our children. They are easy to find all over the digital world.
The two charts above show the same data about the number of people on welfare. But the one on the left has a manipulatively adjusted baseline on the Y axis to make it look like the number of people on welfare is spiking out of control. The same data is plotted at the right, but with the Y axis starting at 0, therefore showing only a slight change.
In this graphic, the chart on the left shows an example of cherry-picking a data range. By only showing a small section of the data, it appears as though the Covid-19 cases are going down, when in reality that is just a small dip in an overall very disturbing trend, as seen in the chart on the right, which shows the full data set.
Updating Our Tool Set
If being able to recognize reliable digital information is so important to our survival, why are we so bad at it? Are we just getting dumber the longer we spend time online? Hardly. With a huge amount of digital information passing in front of us on a given day, we are forced to make decisions about validity very quickly. The faster we can curate digital information, the more successful we are as members of the digital world. Because of this, we rely on a variety of shortcuts to help make quick judgments on the value of digital information. The problem is many of the shortcuts we use are borrowed from the physical world and don’t serve us well in virtual spaces. As kids, many of us were taught if information was printed in a book, magazine, or newspaper, it was likely reliable. I remember learning the saying, “If it’s in print, it has to be true.” Print media were never free of errors or bias, but because printing was an expensive and cumbersome process, the likelihood of having false information in print diminished. If someone invested the time and money to put something into print, they had also likely done some fact-checking. Plus, they had to get someone to agree to distribute their book or magazine, which provided another filter on the quality of print materials. So, if you had to make a snap judgment, the fact that the information was in print wasn’t an unreasonable shortcut.
In the early 2000s, as the source of more of our information migrated from the physical to the virtual world, the “print” shortcut was no longer helpful. So, we evolved to find another shortcut: Does it look like a credible source? In the early days of the internet, web design was expensive and time-consuming. Building professional-looking websites and graphics took complex code or the ability to design in programs like Flash. It was fairly easy to tell a professional site from someone’s personal site based solely on the design and where it was hosted (anyone remember Angelfire and GeoCities?). While also not foolproof, the design of the site was a somewhat reliable shortcut to the validity of its content. But now, with web platforms like WordPress or Squarespace, in just seconds anyone can download a theme that looks more credible than the most prestigious university website. Credible-sounding URLs can also be easily purchased for just a few dollars. So once again, the shortcut of a credible-looking site no longer provides value.
So, what are some shortcuts we can teach our kids to rely on when they need to quickly evaluate the value of digital media? We might teach them to ask:
· Who is the author or creator? (Can you find anything else they have created?)
· Who is paying to make this content available? (Advertising revenue, a sponsoring organization, a paid subscription?)
· What is the goal of the author? (Share an opinion, present research, sell ads, and so on.)
· Is the content endorsed by an organization you trust?
· Do the URLs check out? (We read URLs from right to left, so media.cnn.com would be from CNN, but cnn.media.com would be from a site called media.com.)
· Can you validate the claims with another source? (Are there citations to support the claims of the material? If it sounds like a stretch, does a search on a fact-checking site like Snopes reveal anything?)
· How old is the information?
· Does the content use hyperbolic, alarmist, or emotional language?
· Do photos or graphs appear manipulated? (Use Google Image search or TinEye.com to see where else the images have been used; check for tricks on graph presentation.)
These questions can be answered in less than a minute and can quickly tease out whether a source of digital media is appropriate for our intended purpose. There are also some great tools that can help us. Sites like PolitiFact, FactCheck.org, and Snopes do a great job of fact-checking news.
Should We Trust Wikipedia?
Curating information can be done individually, but it can also be done as a group activity. Group curation can be particularly helpful when dealing with large amounts of information that would be overwhelming for any one person to make sense of on their own. One of the most successful examples of group curation can be seen in the Wikipedia community. While everyone has heard of Wikipedia, its purpose continues to be misunderstood. I cringe when I hear parents or teachers advising against using Wikipedia because it’s not a reliable source of information. That’s like saying, “Don’t go to the symphony because one of the violists might play a wrong note.” But it also exposes a deeper lack of understanding of the key role Wikipedia plays in curating our digital world. Let’s set the record straight.
First, Wikipedia has never claimed to be a reliable source (its own “about” page states, “Wikipedia does not consider itself to be a reliable source”). A whole series of studies have been conducted over the years to show the accuracy of Wikipedia articles, some showing highly accurate results, others pointing out glaring errors.10 Even with the errors, Wikipedia is still likely more accurate than much of the content in your child’s textbooks. But the real question is what value does Wikipedia bring if it’s not a reliable source?
It turns out Wikipedia isn’t trying to solve a reliability problem; it’s trying to solve a curation problem. In the digital world, trying to find reliable answers in the deluge of digital noise is nearly impossible if you don’t already have some baseline information about a topic. It’s what I call the “you don’t know what you don’t know” problem. One of the most challenging catch-22s in your child’s learning journey in the digital world is that without already knowing key terms, people, or concepts about a topic, it can be easy to be misled. If I know nothing about black holes, I don’t even have the basic information I need to start to learn about them. This is the problem Wikipedia solves. A quick trip to the Wikipedia page about black holes would introduce me to concepts such “general relativity” and “event horizon” or people like Karl Schwarzschild and John Michell. It equips me to begin a more informed learning journey. Wikipedia even gives me the next step by providing a list of sources that are reliable at the bottom of each page. The article on black holes offers two hundred of them. Wikipedia is the best jumping-off point for learning the world has ever had. There is even a Simple English version of Wikipedia to help younger readers. So instead of teaching our kids to avoid Wikipedia, we should be encouraging them to use it as the best starting point for deeper learning journeys.
New Forms of Learning
As we wrap up this chapter on creating informed digital citizens, we should recognize that the digital world has done more for learning than just put a massive pile of information at our fingertips. It has also enabled new modes of learning that simply weren’t possible in the physical world. These new approaches can help us overcome some of the limitations inherent to learning in a classroom. When the coronavirus pandemic forced nearly a billion children to stay home, there was a mass migration to online learning experiences. The rushed move to online learning exposed some of its rough edges to be sure, but it also exposed some of the long-standing inequities of face-to-face learning that could be solved in the digital world. Here are three examples.
Accessing Expertise
Education in the physical world requires teachers and students to live and learn in close physical proximity. This creates particular challenges for students in regions where an experienced teacher for a particular subject may simply not be available. When I worked in the US Senate, I visited with education leaders from Omak, Washington, a town with a total population of less than five thousand. The superintendent of Omak schools shared that he had been trying unsuccessfully to fill a math teacher position for five years. There simply weren’t enough qualified math teachers living near Omak, not to mention computer science, physics, or orchestra teachers. This is true for hundreds of thousands of schools around the world. Yet learning in the virtual world is ambivalent to the physical location of the participants. Access to expertise becomes possible for all students, regardless of where they live.
This doesn’t just mean access to other classroom teachers but experts of all types. I recently observed a class at Los Angeles Unified School District where children from an elementary school had the opportunity to use videoconferencing tools to interview elected leaders about their position on environmental issues. When Stacey Moore’s third-grade class at Three Oaks Elementary School in Virginia Beach was learning about animals in Africa, instead of just showing pictures, they decided to go on a virtual safari. Moore arranged for a safari guide to strap on a GoPro camera and take the kids on a live safari experience from their classroom. The students observed the animals in their natural habitats as they asked questions of the wildlife expert along the way.
Addressing Accessibility
Learning in the physical world can be challenging for kids with unique needs. Technology brings a variety of supports to make learning accessible to all learners. Kids who have trouble seeing can use technology to increase font sizes or have a text read or interpreted for them. A young person learning another language can leverage translation tools to better understand the learning materials. A whole host of technologies are available to help students overcome physical challenges that could otherwise limit learning.
I met Kyle Weintraub when he was a seventh-grade student at David Posnack School in Davie, Florida. He had been diagnosed with lymphoma and had to travel from his hometown to Philadelphia to receive lifesaving treatment. Weintraub’s school bought a robot that he could control remotely from his hospital room in Philadelphia. Through the robot, Weintraub was able to participate in his classes, maintain friendships, and ask questions, all without leaving his hospital room.
As parents, we should be aware of the wide range of digital supports that are available to help children who experience physical, emotional, or cognitive challenges to learning and advocate for their appropriate use. Working with your school or visiting sites like CAST.org can provide additional insights into the tools and approaches that technology brings to lower the barriers to learning for students with unique needs.
Personalizing Learning
One of the most significant limitations of learning in the physical world is that it is difficult and expensive to adapt learning experiences to the needs of individual learners. All children have different interests and talents, different backgrounds and goals. Yet we continue to group kids by age into batches of twenty to thirty as if school was a factory. Todd Rose, an education researcher at Harvard University, is challenging our traditional views of learning progress. His research focuses on the idea that learning is jagged.11 In other words, everyone has areas in which they have more expertise than others and areas where they have less. People can be experts in one area, even while they are complete novices in another, and there isn’t a consistent order to what skills they gain before others. This jagged pattern of expertise and inexperience is unique to every single learner.
While learning in the physical world has little ability to accommodate our jagged learning needs, digital tools can do a much better job of adapting to our unique interests and skill levels. At a very basic level, this can mean allowing kids to progress based on their ability to demonstrate understanding, not based on a rigid class syllabus. A variety of digital tools can help identify which concepts our children may be struggling with and provide individualized recommendations to students, teachers, and parents tailored to their needs. Effective personalized learning does not mean having all instruction presented by computer. But true personalized learning leverages technology to provide real-time feedback on student progress and to help parents and teachers customize learning pace and activities to align to each child’s needs and interests. (To learn more about using technology to transform learning, visit www.ISTE.org.)
Futurist Alvin Toffler once said, “The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Informed digital citizens recognize the importance of being lifelong learners. They know how to recognize true and false information. They know how to find meaningful content in a crescendo of digital noise. They experience new learning models made possible by the digital tools. But above all, they view their access to the digital world as a passport to the most powerful learning library ever known. As parents, it’s our job to encourage children’s natural curiosity and enable them to find trusted sources of digital information on their path to lifelong learning.
Next Steps
Action Items
· When your child shows interest in a subject (a sport, nature, a song, an event in history, and so on), find an app, video, or website that helps them explore the topic in greater depth.
· Look for opportunities to praise your child for the effort they’ve put into learning a task that they haven’t yet mastered, rather than focusing solely on results.
· Look for examples of misleading or blatantly false digital media and talk with your kids about some shortcuts that could be used to identify it as such.
· Try using a tool like Padlet or Wakelet to create custom collections of media to share with your kids.
· Explore Advanced Google Search or DuckDuckGo to see what different search options are available.
· Create a Google Alert with your kids for something they care about.
Conversation Starters
· How do you know when something you see online is believable?
· Why do you think people are willing to believe things a family member shares with them online even if they’re not true?
· What are the dangers of not recognizing when something we see online is misleading?
· What should you do if you share something and then you find out that it wasn’t true?
· How might you respond when someone you know shares or posts information that appears to be incorrect?
· What are your favorite places to go online when you want to learn something new?
· What is something new that you’ve learned online recently?